8. HOWARD THE PHILANTHROPIST.

I CANNOT name this gentleman without remarking that his labours and writings have done much to open the eyes and hearts of mankind. He has visited all Europe,-not to survey the sumptuousness of palaces, or the stateliness of temples; not to make accurate measurements of the remains of ancient grandeur; not to form a scale of the curiosity of modern art; not to collect medals, or collate manuscripts;-but to dive into the depths of dungeons; to plunge into the infection of hospitals; to survey the mansions of sorrow and pain; to take the gauge and dimensions of misery, depression, and contempt; to remember the forgotten, to attend to the neglected, to visit the forsaken, and to compare and collate the distresses of all men in all countries. His plan is original; and it is as full of genius as it is of humanity. It was a voyage of discovery; a circumnavigation of charity. Already the benefit of his labour is felt more or less in every country: I hope he will anticipate his final reward, by seeing all its effects fully realised in his own. He will receive, not by retail, but in gross, the reward of those who visit the prisoner; and he has so forestalled and monopolised this branch of charity, that there will be, I trust, little room to merit by such acts of benevolence hereafter.

9. ON THE DEATH OF HIS SON.

(FROM HAD it pleased God to continue to me the hopes of succession, I should have been, according to my mediocrity, and the mediocrity of the age I live in, a sort of founder of a family; I should have left a son, who, in all the points in which personal merit can be viewed, in science, in erudition, in genius, in taste, in honour, in generosity, in humanity, in every liberal sentiment, and every liberal accomplishment, would not have shown himself inferior to the Duke of Bedford,1 or to any of those whom he traces in his line. His Grace very soon would have wanted all plausibility in his attack upon that provision which belonged more to mine than to me. He (i.e. my son) would soon have

"A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD," PUBLISHED IN 1796.)

(1) The Duke of Bedford had attacked Burke in regard to his pension.

supplied every deficiency and symmetrised every disproportion. It would not have been for that successor to resort to any stagnant wasting reservoir of merit in me, or in any ancestry. He had in himself a salient, living spring, of generous and manly action. Every day he lived he would have re-purchased the bounty of the crown, and ten times more, if ten times more he had received. He was made a public creature, and had no enjoyment whatever but in the performance of some duty. At this exigent moment, the loss of a finished man is not easily supplied.

But a Disposer whose power we are little able to resist, and whose wisdom it behoves us not at all to dispute, has ordained it in another manner, and (whatever my querulous weakness might suggest) a far better. The storm has gone over me, and I lie like one of those old oaks which the late hurricane has scattered about me. I am stripped of all my honours, I am torn up by the roots and lie prostrate on the earth! There, and prostrate there, I most unfeignedly recognise the Divine justice, and in some degree submit to it. But whilst I humble myself before God, I do not know that it is forbidden to repel the attacks of unjust and inconsiderate men. The patience of Job is proverbial. After some of the convulsive struggles of our irritable nature, he submitted himself, and repented in dust and ashes. But even so, I do not find him blamed for reprehending, and with a considerable degree of verbal asperity, those ill-natured neighbours of his who visited his dunghill to read moral, political, and economical lectures on his misery. I am alone. I have none to meet my enemies in the gate.2 Indeed, my lord, I greatly deceive myself, if in this hard season I would give a peck of refuse wheat for all that is called fame and honour in the world. This is the appetite but of a few. It is a luxury, it is a privilege, it is an indulgence for those who are at their ease. But we are all of us made to shun disgrace, as we are made to shrink from pain, and poverty, and disease. It is an instinct; and, under the direction of reason, instinct is always in the right. I live in an inverted order. They who ought to have succeeded me are gone before me; they who should have been to me as posterity are in the place of ancestors. I owe to the dearest relation (which ever must subsist

(1) We are told that the grief of Burke for the loss of this highly accomplished son was appalling, and threatened for a while to deprive him of his reason.

(2) In allusion to Psalm cxxvii. 5, "They (a man's children) shall speak with (or subdue) their enemies in the gate."

in memory) that act of piety1 which he would have performed to me; I owe it to him to show that he was not descended, as the Duke of Bedford would have it, from an unworthy parent.

OLIVER GOLDSMITH.2

1. TRANSIENT POPULARITY.

(FROM "ESSAYS," PUBLISHED IN 1760.)

AN alehouse-keeper, near Islington, who had long lived at the sign of the "French King," upon the commencement of the last war with France, pulled down his old sign, and put up that of the "Queen of Hungary." Under the influence of her red face and golden sceptre, he continued to sell ale till she was no longer the favourite of his customers; he changed her, therefore, some time ago for the "King of Prussia," who may probably be changed in turn, for the next great man that shall be set up for vulgar admiration.

Our publican in this imitates the great exactly, who deal out their figures, one after the other, to the gazing crowd. When we have sufficiently wondered at one, that is taken in, and another exhibited in its room, which seldom holds its station long, for the mob are ever pleased with variety.

I must own I have such an indifferent opinion of the vulgar, that I am ever led to suspect that merit which raises their shout; at least, I am certain to find those great, and sometimes good men, who find satisfaction in such acclamations, made worse by it; and history has too frequently taught me, that the head which has grown this day giddy with the roar of the million, has the very next been fixed upon a pole.

(1) Piety in the classical sense of pietas, dutifulness to parents, or relatives in general.

(2) Goldsmith's smooth, graceful, lively, style, "teeming with felicities," a characteristic both of his prose and verse, has always excited the greatest admiration of the critics. "The prose of Goldsmith," says Hoadley, "is the model of perfection, and the standard of our language." Hence the Vicar of Wakefield is adopted in the schools of France and Germany as the English text-book, a distinction claimed not only by its style, but by its naïve delineations of character and manners, in spite of astounding improbabilities and inconsistencies in the plot.

As Alexander VI. was entering a little town in the neighbourhood of Rome, which had been just evacuated by the enemy, he perceived the townsmen busy in the market-place in pulling down from a gibbet a figure which had been designed to represent himself. There were some also knocking down a neighbouring statue of one of the Orsini family, with whom he was at war, in order to put Alexander's effigy in its place. It is possible that a man who knew less of the world would have condemned the adulation of those bare-faced flatterers; but Alexander seemed pleased at their zeal, and turning to Borgia, his son, said, with a smile, "You see, my son, the small difference between a gibbet and a statue." If the great could be taught any lesson, this might serve to teach them upon how weak a foundation their glory stands, which is built upon popular applause; for, as such praise what seems like merit, they as quickly condemn what has only the appearance of guilt.

Popular glory is a perfect coquette; her lovers must toil, feel every inquietude, indulge every caprice, and perhaps at last be jilted into the bargain. True glory, on the other hand, resembles a woman of sense; her admirers must play no tricks; they feel no great anxiety, for they are sure in the end of being rewarded in proportion to their merit. When Swift used to appear in public, he generally had the mob shouting in his train. "A plague take these fools," he would say, "how much joy might all this bawling give my Lord Mayor!"

I know not how to turn so trite a subject out of the beaten road of common-place, except by illustrating it, rather by the assistance of my memory than my judgment, and instead of making reflections, by telling a story.

A Chinese, who had long studied the works of Confucius, who knew the characters of fourteen thousand words, and could read a great part of every book that came in his way, once took it into his head to travel into Europe, and observe the customs of a people whom he thought not very much inferior even to his own countrymen, in the arts of refining upon every pleasure. Upon his arrival at Amsterdam, his passion for letters naturally led him to a bookseller's shop; and, as he could speak a little Dutch, he civilly asked the bookseller for the works of the immortal Ilixofou. The bookseller assured him he had never heard the book mentioned before. "What! have you never heard of that immortal poet?" returned the other, much surprised: "that light of the eyes, that favourite of kings, that rose of perfection! I suppose you know nothing of the im

mortal Fipsihihi, second cousin to the moon?"-"Nothing at all, indeed, sir," returned the other. "Alas!" cries our traveller, "to what purpose, then, has one of these fasted to death, and the other offered himself up as a sacrifice to the Tartarean enemy, to gain a renown which has never travelled beyond the precincts of China!"

There is scarcely a village in Europe, and not one university, that is not thus furnished with its little great men. The head of a petty corporation, who opposes the designs of a prince who would tyranically force his subjects to save their best clothes for Sundays; the puny pedant who finds one undiscovered property in the polype, describes an unheeded process1 (protuberance) in the skeleton of a mole, and whose mind, like his microscope, perceives nature only in detail; 2 the rhymer who makes smooth verses, and paints to our imagination," when he should only speak to our hearts; all equally fancy themselves walking forward to immortality, and desire the crowd behind them to look on. The crowd takes them at their word. "Patriot," "philosopher," and "poet," are shouted in their train. "Where was there ever so much merit seen ?" "No times so important as our own!" "Ages yet unborn shall gaze with wonder and applause!" To such music the important pigmy moves forward, bustling and swelling, and aptly compared to a puddle in a storm.

66

2. THE WAKEFIELD FAMILY.3

(FROM THE "VICAR OF WAKEFIELD," PUBLISHED IN 1766.)

I WAS ever of opinion, that the honest man who married and brought up a large family, did more service than he who continued single, and only talked of population. From this motive,

(1) Process, a protuberance in a bone.

(2) Goldsmith, had he written now, would not have ridiculed the labours of those who "perceive nature in detail." The sneer is unworthy of the writer, as is also the condemnation of the verses which paint to our imagination. There is a sense in which a writer can "speak to the heart" only by "painting to our imagination." (3) Craik severely criticises the plot and conduct of the story. "Never," says he," was there a story put together in such an inartificial, thoughtless, blundering way." He also goes on to assert that "nothing happens, nobody acts, as things would happen, and as men and women would naturally act in real life." This is extravagant. Had this been strictly true, the work would hardly have won the enthusiastic admiration of Göthe, who in early life was, by means of it, introduced to English literature.